The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay

by Andrea Gillies

  On the day Nina moved out, Paolo took the chance to say that she hadn’t really seemed present to him when they were on honeymoon. Other things, other disappointments were cited, as if he’d compiled a list of long-ago infractions, as if the list had silently accrued, ready for the possibility of this moment’s coming to pass. This old view of an old episode, or perhaps new view of it, had shocked her, not just in its having lain in wait but in its being unanswerable. As she was packing a bag, he’d listed them one after another, the ways in which she’d failed him. He’d appeared unconcerned about her leaving. He stood aside and let her leave. He said, “Off you go, then, if that’s what you want.” He hadn’t looked her in the eye. He’d picked up a book and, still looking at it, asked if she needed a lift. He’d said, when she’d called the cab and put her luggage by the door, that he was relieved the day had come that had been so long in coming.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Nina paused in doing her exercises. “I’ve been trying to chat to Nurse Yannis; I asked what it was like here when she was a child but she wasn’t very forthcoming.”

  “No, in general she isn’t,” Dr. Christos said.

  “I’m not sure she likes me very much.” The possibility had occurred to Nina that she wasn’t going to be accepted, loved, a part of things. Perhaps she wasn’t going to be asked to join the women gardeners.

  “It’s not that she doesn’t like you. She’s like that with everyone.”

  “Can I stop this now, because I can’t do any more. Please.”

  “You can stop if you like. Have one skinny leg and see if I care.”

  “I’ll do some more later.”

  “They all say that.”

  “So what was it like? Here, when you were young?”

  The island hasn’t changed that much. Do you see much change, since you were last here? The gift shop, the Internet … that’s about it. The Internet’s made a huge difference.”

  “I bet. The whole world opens up. All those museums, for a start; all that music. All those online newspapers.”

  “I was thinking more of the porn. That’s made a big difference to the shepherd’s life. He can sit under a tree with his tablet and with 3G. Sorted.”

  “Shit.”

  “I think you might have a bit of an idealized view of us. What do you think people talk about? It’s not Socrates and the leader in the New York Times. I was at my aunt’s last night and the talk at the table was all about the problem with pests in the crop, a lot of gossip about the usual people, the war with the neighbor over his dog and the fight at the council.”

  “What’s the fight about?”

  “Ithika wants to build a five-star resort, over at his side. It’s completely divided them. The incomers won’t allow any change and some of the locals agree. Others have developed a healthy respect for cash, and also for celebrities, which is a shame.”

  “It’s like that anywhere, though.”

  “You need to know this about us before you move here. There’s so little that’s really going on that we start to eat ourselves. Everyone thinks they know everything about everyone else. Everyone has an opinion. Sometimes I think I couldn’t stand another winter.”

  “You sound quite jaded.”

  “I am, I’m quite jaded. Sorry. I’m over-tired. But it’s being on your own that makes it wearying. The thing with all places like this is to be with someone, to have a good home life, to have your own team, your own support. It’s all pretty good if you have that.” He glanced at her. She thought, I’m being considered for this, for being his home life. She wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, and because of her own gratitude.

  “Wasn’t it happy, your childhood?”

  “It was fine. I suppose. We didn’t spend a lot of time with our parents. There wasn’t any Scrabble. They worked long hours on the farm — we had the only really sizeable island farm, on the land that’s now the allotments, and also the land that’s now the vineyard.”

  “Why did you sell up? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “I don’t mind your asking anything. Ask away.” He looked at his watch. “I haven’t had breakfast. You didn’t eat this morning, I’m told. Back in a jiffy. I love that word. Jiffy.” He went out and in a few minutes was back with two glass dessert dishes in which berries and granola had been added to thick yogurt. He talked as he stirred them together. “My dad sold the farm when I went to medical school, so you see, unusually, my becoming a doctor was disappointing. I was a disappointment to my father. He managed to stay disappointed with me a long time, and died still disappointed. But I was a medical student and full of myself and stubborn.”

  “Do you regret it now?”

  “I regret my dad being so upset for so long. I still feel bad about that. I could probably have found a way to hang on to it, the farm, tenanted it out. It could have been different but I didn’t see that it could be done differently. It was a hard life, you see, when I was a boy. A subsistence life. There wasn’t any spare money. Getting new shoes was always a big deal.”

  “It sounds like the life that my grandparents’ parents led, in Norway. I never met them but I heard the stories and that was a similar setup.”

  “Well, there you go. The life my parents led was very like the lives of older generations in other parts of Europe. We were backward here in almost every way.”

  “I thought my childhood was absolutely ordinary until quite recently, its happiness, but it wasn’t at all ordinary. In any case I’ve had to revise it, my memory of it. It seemed happy at the time, though I’m not sure a happy childhood does us a service, later on. We go into life with high expectations, and then —”

  He interrupted her. “I love it that you talk like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re one of those people, the kind of people who say everything, who dare say anything, like friends I used to have in the States. You talk about your life, you have ideas about it. It’s not usual to do that here. It’s a relief to be with someone who sees the overview, who sees connections. It’s been lonely since my friend Jason left. He’d been in the States, too, and tried to come home to live but it just didn’t work, so he went back. I’ve been feeling pretty isolated since then.”

  “I’ve been lonely, too.”

  “I’ll get us coffee.” He went out of the room, humming, and was back with the tray a few minutes later, handing a cup across the table. “So how did your parents meet?”

  “My mother came to Edinburgh on holiday with two friends, and they got talking in a theater. Mum was twenty-two and Dad twenty-seven.”

  Anna had become separated from her friends at the interval — they’d gone downstairs to the bar they’d had a drink in before the show, not realizing there was also a bar upstairs. She bought them drinks and waited — they’d gone to the ladies’ room first — but then they didn’t come back. Robert was there with his godparents, and came to her rescue; he’d noticed the other two girls going down the stairs. Impulsively, after chatting outside after the performance, he asked for Anna’s address, saying he might be coming to Norway for a conference. He wrote to her, and they became pen pals. People had pen pals then. They met again the following year, when Robert went to Oslo, saying he was visiting the university — which was true, although the university didn’t know that he was. They married six months later over in Lewis, the island of Lewis, in the church where his father was the minister. Nina was born two years after their meeting in Oslo, almost to the day. On Nina’s first birthday Anna was presented with drawings of a modern house designed by a Norwegian architect. They moved in when Nina was five, so that she could go to a country school in the green outskirts of the city.

  “Do you have a picture of this Norwegian Scottish house?”

  “Not with me. Hundreds at home. My mother took hundreds. Every time she repainted, added something — it was all documented. She really loved it, every inch of it.”

  “And your dad still lives there?”

  �
�He still lives there, though he rattles around and it makes him sad. It drags him down. He doesn’t realize how it affects his mood. I keep telling him he ought to move.”

  “He still misses her.”

  “He was the one who wanted a divorce.”

  “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss her. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t have regrets.”

  “If he did he’d never admit to them. But I see it in him sometimes: guilt. Not directly, but he can be short-tempered, which isn’t like him. He gives a little and then there’s a flat refusal to discuss it.”

  “What’s he guilty about?”

  “Falling out of love.”

  “Well,” Dr. Christos said. “Nothing can really be done about that.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Of course. Don’t you? Nothing can be done about falling in, and nothing can be done about falling out again.”

  “I used to think that, but now I’m not sure. I’m not sure about the terms. Anyway, who am I to say?”

  The house was set back only a little from the road, and passersby could see, through the vast nine-paned window, an interior that glowed in waxed pitch-pine fittings. There was a room-height white enameled stove in one corner, substantial wooden stairs going up to a gallery, low-slung modern furnishings in pale colors, tall vases of naked twigs decorated in Christmas tree lights, and on the wall opposite the window a green abstract with ad hoc upright metallic lines at its center, that Anna always said made her think of her summer home, the lake and the sprawling birch forest.

  Anna’s real mother never married and lived elsewhere and had to work long hours: this was the official reason that Anna was raised by her grandparents, though it may also have been that she’d looked too much like her mother’s married ex-boyfriend. He’d turned up sometimes on Anna’s birthday with gifts, but the trouble was that he didn’t always turn up and there wasn’t any way of knowing if he would or not, because his name was never mentioned. Anna said that she remembered several of her birthdays as days of nausea, of false hope. But she had said this to the teenage Nina with a bright-eyed philosophical look, shrugging as she spoke about it.

  “It must have been hard,” Nina said.

  “Everyone has something about their lives which is hard.” She looked thoughtful. “But this is all in the past, and the past should be shrugged off. I’m serious about this. This is the best advice I’ll ever give you, so listen. It’s vital to live in the present. Live now. Not in everything that’s gone wrong; not in tomorrow and what that might be like. Neither of those days really exists.”

  “They feel like they exist, though.”

  “If you don’t live in the present, right now, then it doesn’t exist, either. You end up with three nonexistent ideas of time, all three of them.”

  Dr. Christos was doing his daily work session in Nina’s room, busy replying to e-mail, and Nina, who was writing her journal, found herself watching him working. She wanted to tell him everything, the whole story. She felt as if she were coming up onto a beach after a long swim. She could take this oblique route into telling him about Luca; she needed to tell somebody what had happened and there wasn’t anyone else she could tell. She would begin with her mother. She said, “Do you find yourself thinking about things your parents said when you were younger? My mother’s been on my mind a lot lately, things she said to me.”

  Dr. Christos considered. “I can’t remember anything my mother ever said to me. Other than for the day-to-day and things I had to do.”

  She told him what her mother had said about time. “Don’t you think that a determination to live in the present might also be a refusal to have feelings about things?” As she was speaking an elderly lady in a floor-length pink dressing gown came into the room. Dr. Christos took her hand and led her out again, speaking soothingly, and they went off down the corridor together.

  Nina went out into the garden, to the steps that led to the shore, and watched an old couple walking along at the edge of the water, a man and a woman, both rangy, leathery, barechested, light-haired northern Europeans. They couldn’t have been further from Anna’s grandparents’ style, which had been buttoned up and conventional, though not joylessly so. Anna was very different from the people who’d parented her, although some things from her childhood had stuck fast. She’d turned over a big section of the plot to a vegetable garden, and had made clothes for herself and for Nina: skirts with appliqué, with strips of ribbon and velvet at the hem; bright summer dresses with big pockets. She was always looking for ways to save, taking absolute delight in the numbers rising in her blue savings book, despite the money, despite the half a million pounds secretly accruing interest in the bank.

  When the grandparents visited Edinburgh — which they managed only once, already well into their eighties — Mormor (the Norwegian name specifically for a maternal grandmother) had tutted her disapproval of the size of the new house, the heat loss that was inevitable through such great, showy windows, though she approved of all the wood inside and the tall stove. She liked the many old things bought at low cost from sales and junk shops, the recycling of old quilts, all the secondhand kitchenware. Anna had taken pleasure in touring the house and showing her what she called the finds: the colander that cost a pound, the antique linens bought for two pounds a bundle, though she’d spared her the sums spent on other things — the astronomical amounts (Mormor would have thought) for light furnishings, sofas and mattresses. Mormor would have keeled over.

  When Dr. Christos came out to join her, with his laptop, with his work, and their conversation resumed, she told him about the Norwegian visitors and about the finds. “Your mother would have fitted in well here,” he said. He began typing again and Nina looked at him, imagining his face if Anna were to walk into the room, his reaction to her. He’d be taken up and swept along. Anna had been a man magnet, and Nina, though she looked near identical, just hadn’t been, not really; not in the same way. There had been some quality about Anna when she talked to a man, an absolute focus on him, inviting eye contact; it had also been about the use of her mouth, her own obvious awareness of her body, fiddling with her hair as she spoke, and that way she had of rubbing her shins, her kneecaps, when seated. The radiant smile, everything in her alive, alive; even in her forties everything about her radiating youth. Nina imagined Dr. Christos after a half hour of chat with Anna Olsen Findlay, his eyes glassy, his face obedient, his whole demeanor lost and craven.

  She said, “It’s fashionable now in the UK to have what they call vintage — you know the word vintage? — but it was considered a bit weird then, to have secondhand things. Paolo’s mother was snide about it, though never to my mother’s face.” Then she added, “Mum knew, though, that she was privately snide, and referred to it once. She could be a bit tactless, sometimes. She didn’t get on that well with other women.” She thought, And here I go, trying to talk a man out of being a little bit in love with someone who’s dead. It wasn’t the first time she’d done it.

  Dr. Christos, oblivious, replied, “We can’t buy clothes or furniture without crossing the water, and so if someone gets bored with a chair or a coat, they swap it. Sometimes they get the original thing back after a dozen swaps. It’s the kind of thing we do to cheer ourselves up in the winter. Andros takes the seats out of the minibus and we move things around.”

  She’d been dying to ask and now she did. “What does your house look like? I must have walked past it every day on the way to the beach.”

  “It’s small, painted white, with a blue door and red flowers on the window ledge. Like every other house, in fact.”

  “What’s it like inside?”

  He looked up from working. “Very simple. There’s a tiled floor, four chairs and a table. Also, highly controversially, white sofas from the mainland. That caused some excitement — my white sofas arriving on a lorry from Athens. But I also have cupboards that were my family’s, ones that came from the farm and that nobody wanted. There’s not much else t
o tell. It’s one big room with two bedrooms above. I have a good kitchen, plus a summer kitchen at the back, one with a roof but no walls, and a small garden. We grow a lot of our own food; the local shopping’s limited, as you know.”

  “You’re right, my mother would have fitted in well. She was a housewife in a very 1970s style, a practitioner of crafts. It was all about the furnishing and bettering of the home, in low-cost, labor-intensive ways, at least once she met her friend Sheila, who was even more into it. The house tracked my mother’s life. That’s why it was so hard to leave; it was part of her and she was part of it. When she left, she was bleeding and it was bleeding.”

  “Nina. Are you all right?”

  “I’m melancholy today. I’m never sure if sharing a problem, a bad memory, is a good idea or not. My mother always said that a problem shared is a problem doubled.”

  In April, the day she’d left Paolo, Nina had intended to go to a hotel, but when she got into the back of the cab it came to her that what she really wanted was to be in her childhood bedroom and in her childhood bed. She had two suitcases and a laptop and an envelope of old photographs: these had been the priorities. Coincidentally, aside from the laptop, this was just how Anna had left Robert, in a cab with two small suitcases and a bag of photograph albums. Robert was thrown by his daughter’s arrival on his doorstep, but he acclimatized quickly, convinced the separation wouldn’t stick, that it was just a row that would be resolved in the morning. He and Nina sat in the dark, nursing glasses of whisky, the only light in the room emanating from the lit stove in the corner, steadily emitting its sweet chestnut wood smell. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened with Paolo, Nina said. She asked if they could talk about her mother.